Cry, Baby

R. J. Cutler spent decades making documentaries about the wily likes of Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney. A burly man with a red beard and a regal manner—Henry VIII without the wives and the panoply—Cutler has a knack for eliciting his subjects’ candor. In his newest film, though, he sought not clarity but ardent confusion. “You know how when you’re walking down the stairs and you think there’s going to be a step, and there isn’t, and for a moment you’re lost in space?” he said. “That’s the feeling I wanted to explore.” This existential quest helped lead him to direct a ten-handkerchief teen melodrama called “If I Stay,” which opens in a few weeks.

One recent afternoon at Balthazar, the SoHo bistro, Cutler wore a gray suit over a blue polo shirt. Steepling his fingers toward the waitress and tapping them briskly, he asked her, “Any way I could get breakfast? Eggs-over-easy kind of a thing?” As she glided off, he explained that his yearning for narrative began as he was editing “The September Issue,” a documentary about Anna Wintour and Vogue, in 2009, and found himself missing directing plays, as he had done in his youth. So he re-versed himself in fiction by helping to conceive “Nashville,” ABC’s country-music drama, and directing the first two episodes. Then he turned fifty. And shortly after that, he said, “my father described himself to me as ‘a young ninety’ just before he went in for the heart procedure he thought he needed.” He grimaced. “I’ve avoided hospitals since he tried to interest me in them as a kid.” (His father was a doctor in family practice.) “I wasn’t crazy about the three weeks I spent in the one where he was dying. And then a hospital set is where we ended up for this story.”

In “If I Stay,” based on a Y.A. book by Gayle Forman, Mia, a young cellist played by Chloë Grace Moretz, is in a coma after a car crash that killed her parents and her younger brother. Her spirit leaves her body and flits about the emergency room eavesdropping on friends and relatives, experiencing extended flashbacks, and wrestling with whether to join her family in the afterworld or return to her body, wake it up, and soldier on with her hunky indie-rocker boyfriend, Adam (Jamie Blackley). On the one hand, her family was pretty cool. On the other, Adam writes Mia a ballad that counsels, “Breathe deep, breathe clear / Know that I’m here,” and Hollywood studios are not in the business of breaking up couples with great skin. Still, Cutler hopes to elicit gasps at her choice. (At a recent journalists’ screening, the gasps may have been drowned out by all the unprofessional weeping.)

Last summer, Cutler polished the film’s script during eggs-over-easy breakfasts at Balthazar, plotting how to build in Mia’s memories of life with her family, those stairsteps of loss. (He also asked Joshua Leonard, who plays Mia’s father, to grow a beard, which made Leonard look a bit like, well, R. J. Cutler.) The director explained, “We shot the raw footage—stuff around the house, in the kitchen, tossing the football—handheld, with a Canon C500, so it would feel like home movies. And we used nearly every frame of it. It was the most vérité aspect of the film, so I knew how emotional it could be.”

As he tucked into his eggs, he said that the biggest novelties in directing a feature were having a script, a large crew, and around eight and a half million dollars—a budget that, though modest by studio standards, dwarfs the tab for a documentary. And then, of course, there was the godlike power of ordaining life as it ought to be, with swoony kisses, a swelling soundtrack, and the world’s shiniest hospital. He observed, “ ‘The September Issue’ begins with a closeup of Anna saying that a lot of people think fashion is silly—and that she thinks they’re wrong. With ‘If I Stay,’ I want you to feel that the whole story is being told from a larger, spiritual point of view. So the beginning is very theatrical.” He called up the sequence on his iPad and began to narrate it: “We open high in the sky, then dive through the clouds. Music, music, music, Beethoven, we find the road, and the car drives by. . . .” He snapped the iPad shut before fate intruded. “I’m very curious to know what it’s like, death—I always say to my wife, ‘I wonder if we’ll have the New York Times when we’re dead.’ ”

Would you want your obituary to describe you as a maker of features or of documentaries? He steepled his fingers again, tapping strenuously, and finally said, “My preference would be ‘long-suffering Mets fan.’ But I hope I have some time left before the question comes up.” ♦

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